Posts Categorized: Journal

In 2014 I made some GeoHipster predictions for the then coming year for the geo industry. As far as crystal ball gazing is concerned I didn’t think I did too badly, though some people disagreed. This year GeoHipster has done it again and I’ve made some more predictions. The whole list of predictions is online… Read more »

At the beginning of 2013 Google launched Google Maps Engine Lite, a simpler and easier to use version of their commercial Maps Engine, which was designed as a successor to Google’s My Maps feature. In essence, My Maps and GME were web based, simplified GIS tools, allowing a user to create maps with overlays of… Read more »

In January of 2014, Atanas Entchev from GeoHipster asked me to make some predictions about where the maps, location and geo industry would go during the course of the year. That year has now passed, so I think it’s time to revisit those predictions and see how inaccurate my crystal ball gazing really was. Raster… Read more »

I don’t grow my own organic vertices. Nor do I use gluten-free technology. At least not that I’m aware. But I have been known to geocode by hand, in small batches and I do follow the @geohipster Twitter account. According to a new map put together by Ralph Straumann, that’s enough to make me a #geohipster.

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these posts, in fact it’s been almost a year. A lot has happened since December of 2013, when I wrote “Who knows precisely where 2014 will take me?“. To be more precise, this is where 2014 took me …

Not all Geographic Information conferences are created equal. A great proof point for this is IRLOGI, the Irish Association for Geographic Information. Today I’ve been in Dublin at their annual GIS Ireland 2014 conference, which is in its 19th year. I’d been invited to give one of the opening keynotes; who could resist such an invitation?

Last weekend, myself and the rest of the OpenCage team were in Karlsruhe in Germany for the second annual OpenStreetMap State of the Map Europe conference. It was probably one of the best run and most diverse OSM conferences I’ve been to.

For a start the key essential elements for a conference were there; there was plentiful coffee and the wifi was both fast and more importantly, it didn’t die horribly during the conference.

I’d submitted a talk called Geocoding – The Missing Link For OSM? and had been asked to actually give that talk. That was my reason for being at SOTM-EU. But we were also going to soft launch OpenCage Data’s latest offering, a geocoding API that’s powered by OSM and other Open Data and which is built using open source commodity components. That’s the reason Ed and Marc Tobias were also in Karlsruhe.

This week the GeoBusiness conference took place in London and as far as geo-themed conferences go it was a broad themed and mixed bag of an event. GIS was heavily represented as was the BIM element of this geo-discipline. The collection of raw data was a prevailing theme on the exhibition booths with drones aplenty and LIDAR cars out in the car park of the Business Design Centre. Thankfully the data and web driven part of the industry was also represented and I played my part by giving a talk.

One of the great things about the combination of maps, geo, location and London is that roughly once a month there’s some kind of meetup happening in the city on these themes. One of the longer running players in this space is the Geospatial Specialist Group of the British Computer Society which is being relaunched and reinvigorated as the Location Information SG. Earlier this week I gave a talk, but what to talk about?

In English, null means nothing, nil, empty or void. In computing, null is a special value for nothing, an empty value. In geography, null tends to be what you get when you’ve been unable to geocode a place or an address and haven’t checked the geocoder’s response. What you end up with is a pair of coordinates of 0 degrees longitude and 0 degrees latitude, a point somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, south of Ghana and west of Gabon. It’s here that you’ll also find Null Island, if you look hard enough.